BRIDE OF A BYGONE WAR

A CIA agent working at the U.S. Embassy in Beirut fears his past has caught up to him in the riveting second volume of the Beirut trilogy.

Higher-ups transfer Walter Lukash, a seasoned CIA officer, from his tour of duty in Jordan to Lebanon to act as a liaison for a fragile political party. Lukash’s orders are to inconspicuously gather intelligence in hopes of increasing the party’s cooperation with the U.S. Embassy, but that task quickly proves problematic when Lukash’s girlfriend from Jordan shows up in Beirut with ties to a wily Syrian national and an assassination plot. Conrad Prosser, the protagonist from Fleming’s (Dynamite Fishermen, 2011, etc.) previous novel, travels to war-torn Beirut at the behest of a source looking for his daughter’s missing husband—whose name happens to be an alias used by Lukash five years earlier. The winding plotlines make for a gloriously elaborate story as Fleming adeptly weaves through genres amid the rubble: suspenseful distrust among the conniving characters, window-shattering action sequences and the understated romantic tension between Lukash and Muna, the woman he left behind. The drama plays against a fiery backdrop of civil war, a setting well established in Fleming’s prior novel and aptly recreated here. This time, the inescapable violence acts as a foreboding presence: a cease-fire breaks the night Lukash arrives in Beirut, where he sleeps in a building riddled with bullets as explosions light up the sky. The rapidly developing plot burns through pages faster than the first time Fleming took us to Beirut.